Palm's Stock Gets a Boost from Verizon and Future Prospects

And, I think, PalmSource (what DO you call it now!?)...

It's called "ACCESS Systems Americas, Inc." and has been for a good while now... It wouldn't take much research to determine that, actually.

...would probably be a LOT cheaper than Palm and I'd bet Access would be happy to part with it (giggle).

How much, and at what odds? I only ask since it's a certainty that you'd lose that bet. (And why do you giggle so much...? Are you huffing nitrous or something...? That'd explain some of these postings, certainly...)

So...why not? Why not (try to) buy PalmSource rather than Palm if, for some bizarro reason. one wants to buy a Linux implementation for phones rather than use what's already very much out there via LiMo and Android?

Well, I'd guess that the first big "why not?" would have to be that "It's not for sale."

You don't seem to understand very much about LiMo-of which ACCESS is, of course, a core member, and where code is being used, and is made available under differing terms, depending on whether one is a member or not-nor about Android, which isn't "out there" in any realistic sense from the point of view of a device manufacturer...

BTW - this IS a serious question - if one IS a company buyer I certainly hope said company buyer is examining ALL options...

Buying our organization isn't one of them, Sorry For The Inconvenience.

(And as long as we're here, where is that posting I'm supposed to have made which "suggested" to you that I'd somehow become "an hourly contractor"...? I'd been suspecting extremely wishful thinking, at best, but now I'm starting to wonder whether it isn't perhaps outright hallucination...)

Hey! I know!

Access can buy Palm!

That would make sense in the context of Access buying PalmSource.

(...)

lefty:
(And why do you giggle so much...? Are you huffing nitrous or something...? That'd explain some of these postings, certainly...)

I'll field that one, if I may: it's an (incredibly) irritating device he uses to imply that what he's posted would be oh so amusing, if only you had the same brilliant insight into the world of technology & high finance as does he. Convenient, that: makes (uninformed) people think you're a lot cleverer than you actually are.

Nitrous is generous. I'd be betting on something a lot stronger.

^^ Dare I say it...? Giggle. Y'know, I wouldn't be entirely surprised to find he's busily snacking away on the life-force of spiders and flies as he makes these little commentaries.

However, the comparison does falter a little when you consider Renfield at least started out sane...

I think your blog post fundamentally misunderstands the real difference between a PDA and an iPod: The iPod (and that goes for the iPod Touch as well as the iPhone) is primarily a multimedia device, not a PDA. The reason you see people taking out their iPods to listen to music when they've already got Centros is that the devices serve completely different purposes. You're just as unlikely to find people keeping shopping lists on their iPhones as you are people listening to music on their Centros. The devices are just used for different things. After all, the Centro isn't that difficult to use for music: Put a card in it, drag the music you want into the installer, and listen to the music on pTunes (or similar players). The reason Centros don't get used much for music is that it's not optimized for that, just like iPhones aren't optimized for organizational tasks. (The inclusion of Outlook-style calendaring on iPhone helps, of course, but slapping a calendar on iPhone doesn't suddenly turn it into a great PDA. For one thing, it doesn't look like the calendar lets you set appointments on the phone itself. It looks like it just syncs appointments you make in Outlook to your phone.)

Now you can say "Hey, but you can do most of those things with one device", but like bhartman34 just said, smartphones really aren't optimized to be PDA's.

Well, to be fair, I said iPhones aren't really meant to be PDAs. I think an iPhone could be a decent PDA, if Apple exposed more of the iPhone's functions through the SDK. If third party developers can't write something as basic as an alarm (because they can't get access to the calendar functions), it won't ever be a decent PDA.

But that's not to say that all phones are awful PDAs. Granted, you have to have pretty good eyesight to use a Centro that way, but once you get over that hurdle, there's not much you can't do with a Centro that you could do with a TX. (One big exception I can think of is e-books. While it's technically still possible to read an e-book on a Centro, I have no idea why you'd want to.) I've used my Centro for things like shopping lists, checking e-mail over the Web, adding things to my calendar, and storing passwords. It's not the big, beautiful experience a TX would be, and it's certainly not as elegant a device as an iPhone, but if you need a phone and a PDA, and you can only carry one thing, you could certainly do worse than a Centro.

But then, you'll notice that I didn't mention multimedia in there. I've taken the occasional picture with my Centro, and even a short video clip, but they both generally come out crappy. And while you can certainly play Tetris or Bejeweled, you're not going to play Quake on a Centro (let alone anything more modern). Music is about the only thing a Centro will do decently, in terms of multimedia, but even there, it's not optimized for it. While the music is easy to play, you've got to have the special headphones to listen to it, or else deal with a ridiculously-tinny speaker.

So my point is, iPhone and Centro/Treos are two entirely different versions of convergence:

iPhone = Phone + Multimedia
Centro = Phone + PDA

The iPhone is in a better position to become a PDA than the Centro is to become a music/video powerhouse, but from the looks of things, I think Jobs has made the (reasonable) bet that most of the world doesn't hold PDA functionality in high regard. As I've pointed out before, the PDA market had started to hit the skids even before the TX or LifeDrive hit the scene. (Recall that Handspring had released the first Treos by 2002.)

What I'm trying to say is, if Palm were to release a TX-sized smartphone with the normal Palm functions, I don't think it would be a big seller. Sure, some people would buy it, but not enough to help Palm, I think. That's why I thought the Foleo could be a good move, if they'd done it right: They could keep selling Centro/Treo-sized phones, but also sell Foleos to people who wanted the big screen and keyboard to match. Unfortunately, they bungled it on the pricing. If they come back with a Foleo II, hopefully the pricing will be more realistic.